Fundraising Guide

Fundraising strategies and tips using peer to peer texting

Introduction

“People donate when they empathize, when they see your cause as an extension of a personally held belief.”

Fundraising through Peer to Peer Texting is meant to create personal connections with the people you reach out to, making them investors in your cause rather than one-off donors. The Peer to Peer Texting platform enables personalized conversations at scale, allowing volunteers to seamlessly manage hundreds of text message conversations with your contacts. The fundraising ask goes out as part of a personal message rather than a template email for everyone on the contact list.

Go through our Starter Kit to get a better idea of how Peer to Peer Texting facilitates personalized conversations at scale.

Fundraising Guide

How it works

How to fundraise using Peer to Peer Texting

How it works

Step 1

Gather your troops

Using Peer to Peer Texting by CallHub for a fundraising campaign is straightforward and simple. Sign up for an admin account for peer to peer messaging. Register your fellow supporters, employees, and volunteers as agents on CallHub. Depending on the number of prospective donors you wish to text, recruit or assign as many volunteers. You can reuse existing call center volunteers for your peer-to-peer texting campaign.

Step 2

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These volunteers you've recruited are to engage in one-to-one text message conversations with the people assigned to them by CallHub. All they have to do is keep hitting ‘Send’ till all the initial texts are sent out. Once the texts are sent, the agents start conversations with the people who respond. The manager or the volunteers themselves can save frequently used replies for faster conversations. A Peer to peer texting campaign typically gets between 10% to 30% response rate depending on your audience and message.

Step 3

Tag, survey, and report

A campaign is not just about sending out messages but also about tracking and measuring for success. Attach a survey to each contact so your volunteers can mark the people who pledge to donate. Assign a tag for all people contacted through this campaign. This tag syncs with CRMs like Nationbuilder, NGP VAN or Action Network. Segment and plan follow up campaigns based on these tags. On CallHub, you can export every conversation, track volunteer progress and reassign conversations that go cold on the volunteers end.

Best Practices

Important points to keep in mind to help you make the most out of Peer to Peer Texting

Collect Mobile numbers

Unlike a voter ID campaign or a GOTV effort, the people you ask donations of should already have shown interest in your campaign. Since your fundraising outreach is going to reach people on their mobile, make sure you are utilizing every opportunity to collect mobile numbers from your supporters. You website sign up form, your social media, and email are all effective channels to collect phone numbers.

If your campaign hasn’t built up a mobile list, you can still use Peer to Peer Texting to reach out to contacts while maintaining TCPA compliance. But in that case, your first mode of outreach should be aimed at identifying supporters rather than asking for donations.

Use surveys within Peer to Peer Texting to mark supporter levels for your contacts in your initial supporter identification campaigns. Afterwards, simply filter your responses in CallHub to segment strong supporters and reach out to them for the fundraising ask.

Contact previous donors

With people who’ve donated in the past, you already know they are strong supporters. They’ll be much more open than cold leads to giving a donation. When reaching out to them, acknowledge their previous donation and let them know the importance of recurring donations to support your cause.

Hi {first_name}, this is {agent_name} from Hope Society. Thanks to you and 360 other supporters, we’vealmost reached our fundraising goal of $10,000 to support the Clean Energy bill. Can you pitch inanother $25 to get us over the edge?

Sure.

Great! Here’s your link to make your donation bit.ly/lknNMq

Done! All the best👍

🙌✌️

Make a mobile-friendly donation page

Your Peer to Peer Texting campaigns should engage supporters in conversations and seamlessly move them to a web page where they can make their donation. Contacts will click on the link embedded in your text to reach the donation page. When they do, make sure it is a mobile-friendly page to avoid supporters churning off from making a donation due to a bad page experience.

Follow up

If your texts don’t reach supporters at the right time make sure to follow up on your donation request at a later date. Supporters who show interest but cannot make the donation at the time can be marked on your Peer to Peer Texting survey so they are easily retargeted in a future campaign.

Have friendly conversations

Donations are built on trust. When messaging supporters, make sure to use friendly language and include emojis to keep the conversations light. You want your messages to look personal and not like they came from an auto-responder.

Prepare a script with answers to FAQ

You are texting different types of people in your Peer to Peer Texting campaigns, people who’ll have different types of responses for your text bankers. While some of the questions cannot be predicted you can supply your volunteers with scripts to the most common questions or responses like:

Yes, I’ll donate.

Not interested.

Busy

How did you get my number?

Don’t text me.

Include these responses when you’re creating your Peer to Peer Texting campaign in the recommended replies section. Volunteers can access your scripts during texting campaigns with a simple on-screen button.

Establish a local presence

Like we said, fundraising is built on trust. Donation requests coming from an out of state number can appear suspicious to a lot of your contacts. When creating your Peer to Peer Texting campaigns rent local numbers that your volunteers can use to send and receive texts and more importantly, to act as their caller ID. This way, a text banker can send out texts from anywhere in the country and supporters will still see a local number on their screen when receiving the text.

Events Guide

Templates

Sample template texts to get you started

Peer to Peer Texting

Fundraising Template

Hey {first_name}, this is {agent_name} from Hope Society. We’ve almost reached ourfundraising goal of $5,000 for the Clean Iowa ballot initiative. Can I send you alink to make a $10 donation?

Sure, I'm glad to help 😀.

Great! Here’s your link to make the donation bit.ly/lknNMq. Thanks a ton for yoursupport! 😀